On July 14, 1987, the sky opened up on Montreal. Rick Leckner, then CJAD's traffic reporter, remembers standing at Plamondon and Décarie watching fire department ladders reach down into what had been, an hour earlier, one of the city’s busiest highways. Cars sat below him, reduced to rooftops poking through the surface of the water. He later said his eyes and his brain took a while to agree on what he was seeing.
The city had been baking under a heat wave for the better part of a week, with five straight days above 32°C and tropic-esque humidity. By the morning of the 14th, a cold front was pushing in from Ontario, and the atmosphere over southern Quebec was primed like a loaded spring. Around noon, the first of four thunderstorm cells rolled up from the southwest, and each one traced nearly the same path across the island, one after another, for two and a half hours.
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